Directed By Renny Harlin

Starring – Madelaine Petsch, Froy Gutierrez, Gabriel Basso

The Plot – After their car breaks down in an eerie small town, a young couple (Petsch and Gutierrez) are forced to spend the night in a remote cabin. Panic ensues as they are terrorized by three masked strangers who strike with no mercy and seemingly no motive, in the first chronological chapter of The Strangers legacy

Rated R for horror violence, adult language and brief drug use

The Strangers: Chapter 1 (2024) Official Trailer – Madelaine Petsch, Froy Gutierrez (youtube.com)

POSITIVES

With many key ingredients noticeably missing in making this a respectable successor, the benefits of the engagement are quite rare, but do stand out like a cheeseburger in a desert, when you’re able to come across one of them. For my money, the sound designs are far too great to be in a movie this uninspiring, with boldly conveying deposits toeing a line of tenderness during quiet sequences, which feel the closest to suspenseful that the movie receives. These are the moments when I easily felt most invested to the plight of the protagonists, and while I often expected where each of these scenes would resolve themselves, I still find it an example of Harlin as a capable off-screen presence, who knows how to immerse his audience in the situations of his characters. Beyond this, my only other praise to the film and essentially Harlin’s direction comes with the way he vividly illustrates the isolation factor of out-of-towners in small towns, which is the closest he comes to managing some of the dread that defined the two previous films in this franchise. Between awkwardly offending dialogue and a coldly consistent reception among the town’s demeanor, audiences at least initially taste a sense of the overwhelming odds that the film coherently constructs against Maya and Ryan, in turn setting the stage for the rest of the film that articulate comfort and help are two things not afforded to outsiders within this setting, all the while summoning a slasher mystery quality that any one of them could be the three masked killers that continuously stalk our coupled protagonists.

NEGATIVES

If you were bothered by the abundance of atmospheric dread of “The Strangers”, or the personality of “The Strangers Prey at Night”, then feast your eyes on “The Strangers Chapter One”, a film so void of even accidental momentum or suspense that succeeds in being the most unnecessary film of 2024. For starters, it’s a film that’s a bit confusing initially, as it was advertised and titled as a prequel, but is actually a reboot, and one that plays things so close to that aforementioned 2008 original installment that it wastes away any opportunity in making this film its own, with only minor advancements in technological conveniences to spur variance, and even those instances are obscured by the cliche of them never working when our protagonists need them most. More on that in a second. For my money, a third installment of the original franchise seems like a no-brainer, but if you go the reboot route, the uncanny similarities of its predecessor constantly remind audiences that they should be watching a similarly-but-better-executed movie, to which I feel has been reboot’s job all along, especially one here that is marred by the predictability of having already lived through an almost identical exploration from start to finish. This of course robs the movie of any suspense or unpredictability, but even Harlin’s direction is no better, both in technical capture, which is student film levels of bad in the obscured and unappealing angles that he terribly conjures, but also in the atmospheric range of the tone, with ominous gloom being a noticeable absence from two previous films that at least maintained audience interests. For this being the same visionary who once crafted films like ‘Die Hard 2’ or ‘A Nightmare on Elm Street 4’, the plunge in quality here feels most tragic, especially to how little he imbeds to the integrity of this franchise, all the while submitting the single most boring installment of the entire franchise, even with the shortest run time in his favor. Harlin takes a lot of the blame, but not all of it, as this unimaginative and pedestrian screenplay serves as a virtual bingo card for the endless array of horror tropes and cliches that adorn its many scenes and sequences, manufactured so obviously and ridiculously that you can’t help but laugh at the abundance of conveniences for its killers. Everything from foggy setting, to dropped phone signals, to never-ending and predictably executed jump scares, to braindead character actions, to even car troubles plague this soulless shell of a script, proving how little of creativity or subversion went into rendering realism to reality, with an unintended familiarity that once more keeps it from standing out among its previous installments or any of the thousands of horror movies that are similarly crafted and executed. On top of this, our trio of killers receive a surprising downgrade in appeal, as a result of silly depiction that robs them of all of the mystique in ambiguity that at least the first two films got right. In a sense, the comedic responses and annoying manipulative tactics are just as consequential to the integrity of the film’s flatlined frights, leaving it incapable of even appealing in a way where audiences unintentionally cheer on the antagonists, especially since the extent of their kills lack any semblance of creativity or compelling capture that adds meaning and merit to the depth of their legacies as horror icons, in turn rendering them as meaningless as the very one-dimensional outlines of characters who they’re forced to chase. On that subject, The Strangers franchise has never been great at illustrating meaningful characters, but Maya and Ryan are downright insulting, with nothing in the way of outline or backstory to vividly appeal to the justification of their following, nor any singular moment of attainable chemistry between them that at least tricks us into supporting their cause as a couple. This element completely underwhelms the stakes of the plot, where I found myself not interested in the slightest what happens to any of the characters involved, but beyond that made the time spent with these protagonists such a chore to be faced with spending so much time with them, where they would be the couple who gets killed off after sex in a better movie, but here we’re forced to see them as a spirited fighters to the unexpected mayhem that continuously lurks outside of their door. Not that the performances from Petsch and Gutierrez are any better, as the former overexerts herself in scenes that don’t exactly call for it, and the latter is so reserved and understated that you have to wonder if the periodic asthmatic conditions of his character’s designs stole any element of emotions or charisma from his various deliveries, especially in treating life altering circumstances like he nicked himself shaving. It’s even strange to see longtime film veteran and Rob Zombie collaborator, Richard Brake, show up as a one-off extra in a diner scene, with no lines or corresponding impact to indulge in the extent of his summoning, as if by some maintained measure to deduce any semblance of momentum from the finished product. Finally, it’s revealed that ‘Chapter One’ is the first in a newly presented trilogy, and in already emulating every element of the original to a tee, the film concludes with an audacious “To Be Continued” on-screen text, sure to elicit more than a few groans, in the unfortunate event that more than one person pays money to see this drivel. Because the events in the foreground of the storytelling convey everything that we need to know about future movies being needed, this feels like another unnecessary touch with the internal disconnect to Harlin’s audience, proving once more the painful realities of adverting the ages old idea that you must successfully conclude one film in order to ask for another, to which ‘Chapter One’ abruptly closes the book on the potential of that possibility.

OVERALL
‘The Strangers Chapter One’ isn’t the worst horror movie of the year, but definitely the most unnecessary, with a rebooted rendering that veers a bit closer towards its generally liked original than preferred. With minimal scares, uninteresting characters, and a buffet of genre-general tropes, the film feels like the stitched pieces of every horror film that came before it, in turn evading any semblance of identity or impact for the first of an inevitably new trilogy whose intention grows stranger by the minute.

My Grade: 3/10 or F